A video clip of Zac McKraken came up in my YouTube suggestions recently. Seeing the opening animation and hearing the music got me feeling a little nostalgic, thinking perhaps I'd give it a play through.
However as the clip moved onto actual gameplay, I couldn't help feeling how eerily quiet it felt all of a sudden. Obviously as technology moved on, later games had voice tracks included, but these early games are pretty much mute. I'm sure for a lot of people that's all part of the charm, but I personally couldn't help feeling how interesting it would be if we could add text-to-speech for the dialogue in these games.
This got me wondering if ScummVM had a feature for this already; I've not used ScummVM for years, and it feels like the kind of feature that may have been implemented. But it appears that isn't the case so far, unless I've missed something?
I then did a little ChatGPTing and a little Googling to try and find out if there's some kind of API within ScummVM that you could hook into which could tell you whenever an actor is speaking. My research skills are not so good, unfortunately, and so far I have been unable to confirm if such an API exists.
That's where I reach out to you guys. Does anybody know if there is anything we can hook into in order to find out when a character is speaking? Or would changes need to be made to the source code (something a little beyond my ability level...)?
As an alternative solution, ChatGPT suggested using screengrabs and OCR to get the actors' text, but that felt quite clunky and there'd be no real way to tell WHICH actor is speaking. Obviously for this feature to be particularly useful the different actors in the game need different voices - which is not really possible with the screen-scrape method.
However as the clip moved onto actual gameplay, I couldn't help feeling how eerily quiet it felt all of a sudden. Obviously as technology moved on, later games had voice tracks included, but these early games are pretty much mute. I'm sure for a lot of people that's all part of the charm, but I personally couldn't help feeling how interesting it would be if we could add text-to-speech for the dialogue in these games.
This got me wondering if ScummVM had a feature for this already; I've not used ScummVM for years, and it feels like the kind of feature that may have been implemented. But it appears that isn't the case so far, unless I've missed something?
I then did a little ChatGPTing and a little Googling to try and find out if there's some kind of API within ScummVM that you could hook into which could tell you whenever an actor is speaking. My research skills are not so good, unfortunately, and so far I have been unable to confirm if such an API exists.
That's where I reach out to you guys. Does anybody know if there is anything we can hook into in order to find out when a character is speaking? Or would changes need to be made to the source code (something a little beyond my ability level...)?
Post automatically merged:
As an alternative solution, ChatGPT suggested using screengrabs and OCR to get the actors' text, but that felt quite clunky and there'd be no real way to tell WHICH actor is speaking. Obviously for this feature to be particularly useful the different actors in the game need different voices - which is not really possible with the screen-scrape method.
Last edited by Pleng,
